this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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@Soyweiser It was a bigger theme earlier: 50s/60s. Asimov, Bradbury, and I think Heinlein all used it.
I recall reading quite a few of those, but don't recall any specific building ones, esp not which much themes of 'people stop interacting with the outside world'.
@Soyweiser Not as a primary focus, but as a background fact, e.g. Trantor in Foundation.
The Caves of Steel was basically named for it, with a major plot point revolving around the fact that everyone is too agoraphobic to have committed the murder because of generations spent living in giant domed cities kept isolated from the natural world.
The granddaddy of those would be E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, from 1909
There's a bit in foundation (iirc) where they go to earth (or somewhere) in the distant future and everyone is totally isolated living in their own super secure little underground bubbles. (or am I thinking of a Clarke short story?) No one even bothers messaging each other anymore because they have nothing to say to each other, they just stay in their own closed system safe from all dangers.
Also James Blish, in the of-their-time-but-still-worth-reading Cities in Flight series.